," it is surely time for the angel
with the brazen trumpet to proclaim, "For him let time be no more."

Lightly let the silver cord be loosed and the golden bowl broken, rather
than that the lonely life linger on, with its eyes fixed only on the
past, which has become but a dim mirage where ghostly figures are seen
walking but from which all warmth and light have fled. Happy indeed is
he who, when the allotted years have been passed, and he lingers waiting
on the stage for the signal which shall cause the curtain to fall
forever on his little life drama, has something which to him is real and
tangible to look forward to in the near future. The bitterness of a
lingering death must be in all old age without this hope.

Let us trust that after that last low cry of Goethe for "more light,"
the morning dawned upon the great intellect and great heart which had
been watching for it so long. Let us hope, also, that the world may yet
learn to see him as did Emerson, who found him "a piece of pure nature,
like an oak or an apple, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a
brier-rose."

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ROBERT BURNS.

"Oh, ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neebors' fauts and folly,--
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water,
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
And still the clap plays clatter,--

"Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals,
That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door
For glaikit Folly's portals!
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences,
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
Their failings and mischances."

Alas for it! we must all say, in dwelling upon the life of poor Burns,
that he so frequently needed to appear as counsel for poor mortals--in
his own behoof; and that "their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
their failings and mischances" should form so large a portion of the
record of that life, which under other circumstances might have been one
of the most brilliant and beautiful of all in the annals of genius. For
Burns, although born to such a lowly life, and having in his youth so
few advantages of education or general culture, might by sheer force of
genius have attained as proud a position as any man of his time, had he
but learned to rule over himself in his youth, and not given full rein